


High-Risk Opportunity

by NevillesGran



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Lightning - Freeform, Mild Vampire Hypnosis, Nightmares, Suicide as Last Resort Kinda, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-02-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:06:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22579054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NevillesGran/pseuds/NevillesGran
Summary: Mike Crew is stalked by a monster from nightmares of a storm, and he doesn't care who has to die in order for him to escape it.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 55
Collections: The_Magnusquerade





	High-Risk Opportunity

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be part of ["Networking"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21229340/chapters/50543855), but it got long enough to stand on its own.

Thunder wracked the sky and in its seizure, it bled pounding rain, making Mike slip as he sprinted across the field. Lightning cracked like a whip on his heels with laughter that blended into the crashing thunder and howling wind. He couldn’t outrun it, he knew that, but he had to _try._ Even as the static licked at his heels, up his spine, jerked his head up with a shock to see the final bolt bearing down on him with a roar that swallowed everything else—

He woke with a gasp, looked up and saw only his ceiling. The window was open and banging in the wind—no thunder, not even rain, just a stiff breeze and a crummy lock, because even a pair of life insurance policies could only get so much in Central London, if you had other priorities than housing.

Except, Mike might be living in a cheap flat with cold showers and thin window frames, but there was little he prioritized more than _security_. He didn’t have a crummy lock on his window, nor his front door, nor his bedroom. And he knew it had been locked before he went to bed, because it always was.

His hand drifted up to find a fresh bite mark on the side of his neck, at the root of the Lichtenberg scars that stretched down his shoulder and chest. He wished he could feel vaguely tired, unimpressed at how overt the message was—like he wouldn’t jump at just an unexpectedly open window _or_ a puncture wound he hadn’t had when he went to bed, _or_ a nightmare so vivid he was still shaking. _You can’t run forever_ was the message, crackling with the promise of a storm. _But it’s fun to watch you try_. 

He wished he could be just vaguely bored, instead of ready to once again shove everything he owned into a suitcase and flee—change flats, cities, maybe even his _name_ this time. But it would find him. It always found him. The monster with a laugh like static that he only ever saw in his dreams.

It hadn’t started when he was struck by lightning, playing in a field at age eight. Or maybe it had—but the first bite hadn’t appeared until he was twelve, when he fell asleep under the bed while a storm raged outside, tracing his scars with one anxious finger, and dreamed that they’d just kept going. Twisting and dividing forever, along veins and arteries and nerves and smaller, smaller, twisting and twining, throwing off paralyzing sparks...

He’d woken up shaking, then, too, and exhausted, with a bite mark exactly where the lightning had struck, as though it was the origin point.

He hadn’t known what it was, then. He’d thought he must’ve scratched it on the underside of the bed when he jerked awake. 

When it happened again, and again, and again, he’d started looking up vampires.

He found his first at age seventeen, a slavering, rotting corpse of a monster that he hunted down when it passed through his hometown, and invited out for drinks. With precautions, of course—crosses, blessed water, pointy wooden stakes (though he didn’t quite believe he was athletic enough to win any sort of real fight.) And he wasn’t so stupid as to invite it home—it went there on its own, and that was how his parents died.

That hurt. So did the loss of his childhood home, burned down in a desperate attempt to kill the rotting vampire. It worked—and destroyed his first real hope of escape, of protection. 

But he knew they _could_ be killed, now. Mike flung himself into research, anything supernatural or paranormal or just unsettlingly horrific. That was how he found _The Boneturner’s Tale_ and its terrible alchemical secrets for human transformation. 

But the promised strength, speed, immortality did nothing to abate the dreams—when the Boneturner’s complex formulae produced anything real at all. They didn’t even replace the blood that disappeared every couple nights when he finally succumbed to sleep. Or maybe Mike just wasn’t a mage—it took a natural talent. All Mike really learned was that he didn’t care who else he killed, so long as he could escape. 

But Books were safer than monsters, for the most part, and easier to find. It took him nearly a year to find the next book of magic, and when he did, it was in Cyrillic, and tried to read him rather than the other way around. He closed it as quickly as he could and buried it in an empty moor.

He went to Chichester for the university library and used book stores, and the unusual wealth of folklore and urban legends of monsters in the night. _Some_ of them had to be true. Maybe there was someone who could help him, or something. Maybe there was something that would be annoyed that his lightning terror was encroaching in its territory. Maybe he was getting more desperate with each stormy nightmare.

He’d almost given up by the time he found _Ex Altiora_. It wasn’t a book of magic, not really—it was cursed to suck in a reader, literally; Mike barely managed to tear his eyes away from the pages, much less put it down. His fingers stuck to the spine as though by vacuum, and each illustration held another figure screaming for release. The nameplate said _From the Library of Jurgen Leitner_ , a phrase littered through the supernatural community like the ashes of Nero’s Rome. 

It wasn’t a very good book on its own merits, either, when he loaded up on every protection charm he had and handled the pages with gloves. The writing was confidently indecipherable cursive, structured like Latin poorly translated from Italian, and not actually very good in terms of story. A village, a monster, inescapable death from the sky...

An autobiography. An author, the name nearly unreadable, but recognizable nonetheless by the matching signature on a handful of old paintings. From hundreds of years worth of folklore and urban legends. And Mike wasn’t a mage, but he could do a simple sympathy-based tracking spell, with a handwritten book and a signature to base it on.

It came to a head in a storm—of course it did. Of course the wind was howling and the thunder raging and the lightning crackling like it remembered Mike fondly and just wanted to say _hello, did you miss me, let me caress you until you’re screaming in pain and begging for release_. Of course, just as the spell snapped into place, pulling him to somewhere across the city, there was a knock on the door and the little bookseller barged in, shouting something about a bounced check. Of course as soon as Mike pushed past him, stumbled over the doorstop as he fought his own reluctance to step out into the weather, a familiar bright cackle teased the edges of his hearing, matched by a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye.

He ran. He slipped and slid and _sprinted_ through the streets of Chichester, _Ex Altiora_ clutched to his chest, to feel the direction of the spell and to keep it safe in the pounding rain and driving wind. For himself, he paid no heed, just turned a corner and caught a glimpse of a figure in pursuit, and ran even faster. 

The spell led him to Chichester Cathedral, book tugging against his arms. The lightning cracked behind him and Mike’s breath caught from exertion and panic as he struggled up the endless stairs. He arrived in time to see the faint outline of a figure just beyond the open window, already disappearing into the dark sky blurred by rain.

“No!”

Footsteps on the stairs. He whirled. The bookseller, panting, pitiful but consequential (no more money, no more time.) And behind him, the echo of a shape, a tall figure from nightmares only, with sharp teeth and lightning-bright eyes—Mike knew in his heart that this was it, this was the end one way or another—

The eye of the storm descended. Outside, the wind still howled, the thunder still raged, the rain still coursed down like a sheet and the lightning still cracked like a hungry whip. Inside, he was wet, freezing, exhausted, and cornered. But for a moment, for maybe the first time since he was eight, Mike felt calm. 

He flung the book at the vampire’s head, spun back to the open window, and leapt.

Halfway down, someone caught him by the arm.

“Woah, there, sonny. Don’t you know it’s rude to go falling where you could crash into innocent people out for an evening flight?”

“I—” Mike managed, in the shock of his newly dislocated shoulder.

“Well, people out for an evening flight,” the vampire amended thoughtfully. “Well...beings. A being, at any rate.” 

He didn’t look like Mike’s image of a vampire. He looked _old_ , withered, shrunken. Even his wings were skin barely clinging to bone, though maybe they had always been like that—vast, skeletal, bat-like things. _Simon Fairchild_ , local gossip called him, though that wasn’t the name Mike had followed through the night.

He hoisted Mike into more of a bridal carry, flying upward with barely a flap of his wings. “Well, you wouldn’t be the first meal I’ve had on their way to a grisly suicide. Did you know, once your body is splashed out on the pavement, they rarely check to see how much blood there was?” He offered a comforting smile, full of sharp fangs. “Very useful way to hide a kill.”

Fairchild’s eyes were very dark, and very red, and seemingly endless in depth. Mike felt like he was still falling, even though he was provably held—even though, as he fell, he somehow felt _safe_ , more peaceful even than in that crystalline moment of calm. The rain drove down on them, the wind buffeted, the thunder and lightning snapped at their prey, but Mike was...

Mike was. No, he. He’d read about this. Don’t make eye contact, don’t—

“I don’t want to die,” he said, slurred through the hypnosis, and just the act of saying it seemed to make the rest easier. He struggled to sit up in Fairchild’s arms, and point back at the cathedral window. He couldn’t move one arm. “I just want away from _that_.”

The other vampire leaned over the windowsill, glaring into the storm. They looked much less threatening now; Mike wondered if it was the detachment of another monster’s charm or just the fact of seeing them straight-on. The bright eyes were as he’d dreamed, cruel and cold; lightning reflected off of glistening fangs. But they were thin in a way that looked unhealthy as much as inhuman, and their ice-pale blond hair was a mess from the storm, and they held _Ex Altiora_ in one bare hand as though they didn’t know what it was.

“Thanks for catching my prey, old man,” they said with a leer. “Now give him back.”

“Oh, that’s even ruder,” Simon Fairchild murmured, quietly enough that only Mike heard.

“I would _very_ much appreciate if you killed them,” said Mike. He bared his neck with as much dignity as he could summon.

“Outright impudence!” said Fairchild. But this time his sharp grin came with twinkling eyes and a conspiratorial wink. “Don’t know that it’s necessary, though.”

Mike looked back to his monster in the window. It wasn’t pretty, to see a human-shaped thing get sucked into a book. It gave him a migraine, even through the exhaustion and aching shoulder and strange peace of whatever Fairchild was doing to make him unafraid of the prospect of being drained of blood until he died.

But he didn’t think it would give him nightmares.

. . .

With a wrench, Mike pulled himself out of the memory. In his arms, much as Simon had once held him, the new Archivist gasped as though he’d been drowning. His presence withdrew from Mike’s mind—mostly.

“That was...rather nice, actually,” Mike allowed. “I’m not usually one for reminiscence, but that was...pleasant.”

“What, ah—” The Archivist pushed in again, even as he clung to the front of Mike’s shirt. Mike had only met two vampires of the Beholding line before, and avoided both of them at all cost, but this new one was clumsy even for a fledgeling. More memories started to flicker to the surface of his mind—Simon’s country home with all its spires, the first burning taste of blood—

He didn’t try to evict the Archivist again. He just opened his arms and let him slip a little, a hundred meters above the hard streets of London. 

The Archivist’s psychic groping cut off with a soft shriek, and he held even tighter to Mike’s shirt. A futile prospect, as the fabric could and would rip, if Mike beat his wings hard enough. 

(He didn’t really need to, to just hover here. They were more magically-symbolically than mechanically functional. But nor was he Simon, with millennia of power to draw on to soar wherever he wanted with just a thought.)

“Take my mercy and go, Archivist,” he advised as he let them sink back down to the earth. The fog around them was piercingly chill, but only for those with warm blood to start with. “You have touched something few people walk away from—”

He broke off at the sight of a figure on the ground, staring directly up at them with the patience of an ambush predator. “I thought you said you came alone.”

**Author's Note:**

> On one hand, killing Mike in cold blood is SUCH a good moment for establishing Daisy as, you know, brutal and terrifying. On the other hand, I love Mike and I want him to (un)live...


End file.
